While many parts of America are still not served or are underserved by 3G mobile internet connections, many service providers and consumers in large cities are already looking towards 4G data services. These services include the ill-fated Xohm service Sprint is pushing as well as the service being offered by Clearwire.

In 2009, Sprint plans to debut 4G service in Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Fort Worth, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Portland, and Seattle. Sprint says that in 2010 it plans to add more markets including Boston, Houston, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

To go along with its 4G network, Sprint has announced that it plans to roll out additional 4G devices in 2009 and 2010 that will include a 4G single-mode data card, embedded laptop cards, home broadband modems, and a tri-mode phone. The first Sprint 4G wireless network launched in Baltimore in September of 2008, but was not commercially available for some time after that date.

Sprint VP Todd Rowley said in a statement, "Sprint continues to lead the wireless industry by harnessing the power of WiMAX. The availability of Sprint 4G in more places this year and our aggressive expansion of Sprint 4G service demonstrates our commitment to provide 4G capabilities and devices nationwide for our business, consumer and government customers. These capabilities enable significantly enhanced performance and productivity for our customers."

Sprint doesn't offer any concrete product names or specifications on devices that it plans to launch. The products certainly won't be from Nokia. Nokia announced in early March 2009 that it would not be producing devices for WiMAX, Sprint's 4G specification, and would instead support the rival LTE specification being backed by all other mobile providers in America.

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While nice in concept, I hardly think that a bureaucracy based in DC is going to be the most efficient method of reviewing millions of small business loan apps and picking the winners and the losers; as Milton Freidman so eloquently put it (and I'm paraphrasing here), why does everyone always assume private ambition is inherently evil and greedy while political ambition is somehow noble and perfect? If you really want to see loan and investment activity pick up stop having the Gov’t buy up trillions of dollars in bonds each year. If they did, all the money they consume would then be directed to the private market, and we would see a lot more innovation and growth as a result.

That is the real Sh*tty deal with the stimulus package(and President O’s budget proposal); it assumes a few hundred politicians in DC know how to invest hundreds of billions of dollars more efficiently then the organized market activities of several hundred million Americans. The $780 (or $1.2 trillion, if you add in interest) has to come from somewhere; either they print it (al la Bernanke and the Fed buying T-Bills/Bonds) or, as (still) the largest and most trustworthy borrow, the Fed crowds out the private bond market and soak up ~trillion dollars that otherwise would have been deployed much more productively by the private market.

Either way, through inflation of the currency or transfer from private to public sector, the amount of capital available to the private market is reduced.While I don't think the Stimulus bill will sink the country, it will lower the growth rate of our economy (and, by extension, our standard of living) as real, long term growth comes from the level of return that we will get from our aggregated investments. Frankly, I'd be surprised if the Gov't mandated "investments" even break even, whereas advance industrial economies such as the US (may not seem like it right now) typically average 2-4 % growth year over year. Thanks to the miracles of compound interest, even a difference of 1%-2% in overall growth year-over-year will lead to dramatically higher living standards over an average persons lifetime.

Right now over 22% of our entire GDP is controlled by a few hundred members of Congress and the bureaucracies they oversee. Even assuming nothing but the best intentions (which is quite an assumption), humans, individually, are extremely fallible and prone to error. We can either trust in markets that, while imperfect, do factor in the opinions and desires of all market participants (which pretty much means all of us), and in aggregate embody the wisdom of all of us, or we can leave our spending decisions in the hands of a body that in majority is lawyers and who has a significant amount of members whose credit rating is so low they can not even qualify for a credit card.